Monday, March 26, 2007

I'm so happy that I switched to zsh, it's like how I live inside Emacs, you might not need all the features, but you know if you ever need something, that you can do it. It's really nice to know that the things I'm learning now I'll be able to use 20 years from now, the constant relearning process really sucks when it comes to things like your shell and editor.

Indexes are a way to speed up access to certain rows in your database. Indexed keys are stored in a special datastructure, usually something like a B-tree which allows quick lookup of columns in a SELECT.

How Prototype extends the DOM. I find Prototype essential to using Javascript, I have come to really rely on things like the $() selector, and now with the enhanced performance of $$() in Prototype 1.5.1, I'll be using it even more.

This is a really interesting concept, and is going to be really useful for deploying applications on EC2. Right now, it's a little tricky, because each EC2 node isn't persistant, so you have to store all your permanent data on S3.

Now, we need something like this to be GPLed, and perhaps something more like Gluster, so that we could use those huge 160GB disks on each EC2 instance for fast access and caching, and then use S3 for permanent storage.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

It was finally getting to me how I would have to press the "o" key fourtimes just to see where I was in the program. So, I hacked thesource. This is why free software is so important, sometimes, yourfreedom includes not having to type the "o" key four times. Yourfreedom is also how you interact with the world, and having to do thatover and over was getting to me. Ok, rant over, code begins:

I looked through the code until I found the code that deals with thekeypresses and found the relvant section, and just hacked it brutallyto do what I want. osd_level can be 0..3, and I wanted it to cyclebetween level 1, which is the osd enabled, and level 3, which is fullosd display. So I changed the code to say:

I love this plugin: annotated models - It puts your schema definition at the top of your app/model/*.rb files. This is really sweet since you then don't have to have your schema.rb and your model.rb file open at the same time.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Friday, March 09, 2007

For yarn.sness.org, I need to slurp a bunch of data into a database,and I remembered doing this for lovemygarden as well. The trick is toput the data in a yaml file and use load_from_file to load the data.

Monday, March 05, 2007

Also, a really nice mode for editting HTML/XML in Emacs is nxml-mode. I'm personally doing all my HTML with Ruby on Rails, even for static sites, I use RoR and generate static content, and for all my Rails interaction I use rinari.